The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

by Lauren Willig

  What had he said? Richard wished he remembered so that he could say it again, if this was going to be the reaction. But he was too busy enjoying the outcome – in this case, Amy trailing somewhat better-aimed kisses along his ear and his throat – to think too deeply about it. Richard groaned happily and plunged his hands into the lavender-scented mass of Amy’s hair.

  Brushing her hair back from her face, he leant over to return the attentions, bracing his right elbow on the seat next to Amy. At least, he meant to brace his elbow next to Amy. Richard flailed for a moment as his body teetered on the edge of the bench, Amy’s arms around his neck acting as a counterweight keeping him steady. Until, that was, Amy popped up to press a particularly exuberant kiss on his ear.

  Ka-thunk!

  They landed with a thud on the floor next to the bench, Amy sprawled on top of Richard. The boat careened back and forth as though they were on the high seas in a midwinter tempest, rather than on the Seine on a clear spring night. Since Amy was perched on his rib cage, Richard was having somewhat more difficulty breathing than she was. But, given the view afforded by her gaping bodice, Richard had no inclination to complain.

  Little trickles of water frothed up over the edge of the boat, and the boatman spat a curse. ‘Amants!’ He made the word Lovers sound like the rankest of insults.

  ‘Amy, amas, amants…’ Richard chuckled, holding a squirming Amy by the hips as she tried to wiggle off of him.

  ‘Don’t you mean, amo, amas, amat?’ Amy giggled the conjugation of the Latin verb ‘to love.’

  ‘I like my version better,’ murmured Richard, nipping her ear.

  Amy pushed at the Purple Gentian’s chest with both hands, as she attempted to lever herself up. The boat rocked dangerously.

  ‘I think you’d better stay here,’ he whispered, running a hand under her tumbled skirts to capture an ankle. ‘It’s safer.’

  ‘For whom?’ gasped Amy, as the Purple Gentian’s hand rose higher, sliding from her boot-top, following her silk stocking up along the curve of her calf and knee, pausing to toy with the ribbons of her garter. Amy jumped as his finger brushed along the bare skin of her thigh.

  ‘For the boatman, of course.’ The Gentian grinned. ‘Less chance of us capsizing.’

  ‘Oh. I don’t know if that’s—’ began Amy, only it came out as, ‘Iwa wo wo iwa,’ because the Purple Gentian made up for the shortcomings in his argument by twining his free hand in Amy’s hair and making sure Amy couldn’t argue back.

  Long moments later, he grinned at a breathless Amy. ‘I thought you’d see it my way.’

  All Amy could see were stars, hundreds of stars, thousands of stars, dancing along the backs of her eyelids as he pulled her mouth back down to his, his lips moving on hers as velvet soft as the dark night. Their tongues twined together, warm and sweet. Amy swam in a dizzying wine-dark sea of sensation as the Purple Gentian’s lips moved on hers and his knowing fingers teased the soft skin of her thigh. Was the boat swaying, or was she? Blindly, she slid her hands up under the Gentian’s shirt, the ribbed muscles of his chest the only thing solid and sure in a wildly swaying universe. A dusting of hair tickled her fingertips.

  Sensation after sensation assaulted Amy, the brush of hair across her palms and the moist thrust of the Gentian’s tongue. The Gentian’s fingers rubbed up against the fabric of her linen drawers, creating an odd tension that made Amy wiggle and arch towards him. The Gentian released her mouth and lifted his head to capture a ripe pink nipple in his lips. Amy drew back in surprise, but the Gentian refused to be dislodged, sucking and licking and tugging, until the fingers she had raised to his head to try to push him away were twined in the hair under his hood, pulling his mouth closer.

  ‘Oh,’ she gasped. The Gentian didn’t reply; his mouth was full.

  An even louder ‘oh!’ escaped her as the Gentian’s fingers discovered the slit in her drawers and slid up into her liquid warmth, stroking, searching… Amy cried out as a tremor of pleasure shot through her. Without withdrawing his intimate touch, the Gentian rolled them over so that she lay beneath him, blinking up at him with eyes dark with desire.

  ‘I thought you’d like that,’ the Gentian murmured against her lips, before sliding his tongue into her ready mouth.

  Moving her hips in restless circles against his fingers, Amy made wordlessly clear to him how much she liked it. She clutched at his shoulders as shivers ran through her that weren’t shivers at all but little lightning jolts of intense pleasure. And then the storm itself broke, dispelling all the tension in her body as torrents of indescribable feeling thundered through her. It swept through her like a shower of shooting stars, touching every nerve in her body with celestial fire.

  It was the most wonderful night of her life.

  It was about to become the most awful night of his.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Reason returned to Richard with the force of a blow.

  It took Richard, his hand on the buttons of his breeches, a second to realise that it had indeed been a blow. From the boatman’s paddle. Accidentally, or otherwise, the boatman had dealt Richard a stinging whack right on the back of his head.

  But the lump on his head was nothing to the bulge in his breeches. Urgh. Now there was pain. Rather prominent parts of his anatomy were screaming at him in intense irritation. Below him lay Amy, her lips red and swollen, slightly parted, her eyes misty with desire, damp, ready, willing. It would be so easy – so natural – to ease up those tousled skirts…

  Richard hauled himself up onto the bench, and plunged his hands over the side, letting the cold water wash the arousing scent of Amy off of him. He would have stuck his head over the edge, too, but he wasn’t at all sure what might be lurking in the water, and he wouldn’t put it past that boatman to help the rest of him into the river with that confounded paddle. Although, Richard supposed, he really ought to be thanking the boatman rather than cursing him. If not for that fortuitous blow… Richard’s face paled in a way that had nothing to do with the icy temperature of the water. Had he really been about to take Amy on the floor of a dirty boat in the middle of the Seine? Oh God. What had he been thinking?

  He hadn’t been thinking. That was the problem.

  As cold water and equally chilly thoughts began to clear the haze of lust from Richard’s brain, he realised that the murmuring noise he’d been half-hearing for some time wasn’t the swaying of the waves, but the monologue of the boatman, who was muttering, ‘Go on. Act like I’m not here. Treat my boat like a brothel. Don’t matter what I think, do it?’

  The last time Richard had blushed had been in the summer of 1788, when, as a spotty twelve-year-old, he had been caught gaping down the bodice of the Duchess of Devonshire. Fifteen years’ worth of embarrassed flush burnt in his cheeks, mercifully hidden by hood and mask. Leaning over, he helped Amy up from the floor, trying not to look too closely at her pink cheeks and shining eyes.

  ‘That was wonderful,’ sighed Amy happily.

  For wonderful substitute awful, thought Richard grimly as Amy snuggled trustingly into his side. Idiot! Him, that was, not her. He could only thank whatever powers out there that were still keeping an eye on him for stopping matters before they reached the ultimate point.

  ‘Do you want me to row back and forth – again?’ the boatman asked sourly, flinging his rope expertly over a piling.

  ‘No,’ Richard said shortly. He dropped a few coins in the man’s calloused hand, so consumed with self-loathing that it took him a moment to realise that Amy was attempting to climb out of the boat on her own, teetering back and forth with one foot on the edge, and looking in imminent danger of toppling into the water at any moment.

  Chalk up another point against him.

  Richard handed Amy out of the boat and tried not to notice the way her fingers lingered on his arm or the glowing smile she cast up at him from under her too-large hood. Considering what had just transpired, she had every right to the possessive clasp, as well as to the sm
ile that gave affection and assumed it in return. Hell, she had every right to an instant proposal, bended knee and all. Or at least the confession of his true identity.

  But he couldn’t give her any of those things. Not yet.

  Tony’s spectre rose before Richard’s eyes, blocking out Amy’s smiling face. Not Tony as he had known him in life – that Tony, a dandy in an embroidered waistcoat, with a light foot for the dance and an appreciative eye for the female form, would have cheered on a bit of dalliance – but that other, awful Tony. The Tony lying bloody and abandoned on the dirt floor of a French hut because he, Richard, had been distracted from his duty by a woman.

  Something else niggled at the back of Richard’s mind, something to do with the Swiss gold. Something he would have noticed before had his brain not been muddled with desire. How in the hell had Amy known about the Swiss gold? True, he had seen her come flying out of Bonaparte’s study as though possessed of a dozen furies, but he had searched that same room not half an hour later and discovered no such information. If he had, he wouldn’t have had to spend the evening trying to pry the same intelligence out of the First Consul’s brandy-sodden brother-in-law. If Amy hadn’t learnt of the Swiss gold from searching Bonaparte’s study, then where?

  A chill that had nothing to do with the night air engulfed Richard. Based on Geoff’s reports, and the evidence of his own eyes, Balcourt was up to something that involved the transport of mysterious packages. He spent that part of his day not occupied by his tailor lurking about the Tuilleries. It took no great leap of intelligence to jump from there to the conclusion that Balcourt was up to his neck in the affair of the Swiss gold. And Amy was his sister, mysteriously summoned back to France just as Napoleon commenced his plans for the invasion of England. What better way to entrap the Purple Gentian? Provide him some intelligence, discover his plans…and summon Delaroche. It would be a sure way to Bonaparte’s favour for Balcourt and his sister.

  Richard’s eyes slid sideways towards Amy, down to the little hand resting so trustingly on his arm, and he swore silently.

  Nobody could be that good an actress. Her reactions to her parents’ deaths could have been feigned – but if so, she ought to be at Drury Lane, partnering Kean. Every one of Richard’s instincts, well-honed over a decade of outwitting the French, screamed her innocence.

  But he couldn’t take that chance. How many of his men would be involved in the assault upon the coach bearing the Swiss gold? A half dozen at least. Geoff would insist on going along, Geoff who was one of the two men Richard could unreservedly call friend.

  He had to end it with her. And later, when it was all over, when the mission was safely accomplished, when the invasion of England was thwarted, he could make it up to her. There was no other choice.

  Next to the Purple Gentian, his hand warm and strong under her arm, Amy drifted through a world wreathed in magic. How could she have thought the streets of Paris dingy? The cobblestones glimmered in the moonlight, and the dark windows twinkled with stars. Beautiful, beautiful stars. Tilting her head back, Amy traced familiar patterns through the sky.

  A necklace of stars. Amy hugged the phrase to her like a pile of love letters. When he had first uttered the words, she had been shocked speechless, more shocked than she had ever been in her life. That this man she had known for a mere two days – even if she had been daydreaming about him for most of her life – should be able to slip into her mind and retrieve one of her most precious memories… it was inconceivable. But then, somewhere between the stars and the tender expression on the Gentian’s face as he looked down at her in that silly little boat, everything had made complete sense. This was her sign – practically a certificate of approval from her parents – that he was her true love. What other explanation could there be?

  Far away, up in the darkness, Amy could have sworn one of the stars winked.

  Amy’s speculations were cut short as they turned along the side of the Hotel de Balcourt. The Gentian’s head was turned away from her as he checked for an open window, his hood hiding all but the tip of his nose from Amy’s view. Her hands still tingled with the feel of the short, crisp hair hidden under that hood. And the rest of her tingled with other memories entirely.

  As they drew to a halt outside an unlatched first-floor window Amy turned to face the Gentian, gazing up at the masked face revealed beneath his hood. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘Thank you for rescuing me, and thank you even more for everything else.’

  Rising on tiptoes, Amy swayed towards the Purple Gentian, lifting her face for a tender farewell kiss. She nearly toppled over as he took a jerky step back.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the Gentian said abruptly. ‘None of this should have happened.’

  He was back to being dark and inscrutable. In the shadow of the house, the Gentian’s hooded face had all the expression of a faceless monk in a gothic novel. It was just the shadow of the house, cutting off light, which made the Gentian look so aloof, Amy reassured herself. This was, after all, the same man who had laughed with her, kissed her, and promised her a necklace of stars. Unlike the evening’s earlier identity confusion, there could be no doubt that this was the same Purple Gentian of an hour or half an hour past, even if he was anonymously swathed in a dark cloak and hood. Amy had kept a hand on his arm at all times.

  Until now.

  Since that was clearly a situation that needed to be remedied, Amy took a step forward and rested a hand on the Purple Gentian’s chest. ‘Don’t be sorry,’ Amy said feelingly. ‘I’m sorry to have dragged you into a fight with Marston, but I can’t regret anything else that happened. It was the most absolutely wonderful night of my life. You’re the most absolutely wonderful—’

  The Purple Gentian shook his hooded head. ‘Don’t, Amy.’

  Under her fingers, the Gentian’s chest was rigid, unmoving, as though he wasn’t even breathing. Amy tilted her head back, back to the point of dizziness, to peer through the slits of his mask. ‘Are you worried that the praise will go to your head?’ she teased. ‘And that it will puff up until you can’t fit into your disguises anymore?’

  The Purple Gentian redirected his gaze somewhere to the left of Amy’s shoulder. Amy had to resist the impulse to turn around to see what could possibly be so engrossing.

  ‘I’m serious, Amy,’ he said flatly.

  ‘So am I,’ said Amy cheerfully. ‘I do think you’re wonderful. How would you like me to prove it to you? I could follow you into Hades, like Orpheus after Eurydice. I could—’

  ‘Amy, we can’t see each other anymore.’

  The exuberant words Amy had been about to utter withered and died unspoken. She pulled back and stared at the Gentian. ‘What do you mean?’

  Surely, there must be some other meaning to his words. Perhaps what he meant was that they couldn’t go on meeting at night like this. She could agree with that. It would be much nicer to meet by daylight, to see his face when he spoke to her. Or maybe he meant his words literally; in the gloom, she really couldn’t see him anymore either, Amy rationalised madly.

  ‘I meant just what I said.’

  His words might have been uninformative, but the tone of his voice, as stony as his motionless body, brooked no misinterpretation. Amy’s spirits plummeted from the stars to the grimy cobblestones at her feet.

  ‘You don’t want to see me anymore?’ Amy hated the little quaver she heard in her own voice.

  The Purple Gentian nodded slowly.

  It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense at all. It might as well have been a series of grunts, rather than words, for all the sense it made. Amy bit her lip on the anguished ‘why?’ that was trying to burst out of her mouth and lowered her eyes to stare at the Gentian’s scuffed boots. He liked her. She knew he liked her.

  Didn’t he? After all, he had rescued her and kissed her and – oh goodness, there had been the necklace of stars. Surely, if he didn’t love her, he wouldn’t have done any of that. Would he?

  Amy’s hands curled
into fists as she marshalled her panicked thoughts. There must be another reason.

  ‘Are you worried about my reputation?’ she blurted out. ‘Because as long as we meet discreetly there’s really no cause to worry.’

  ‘That’s not it.’ A wintry undertone of regret ran through the Purple Gentian’s words, as chill and dead as a garden in December. Taking Amy’s hand, which still rested forgotten against his heart, he gently returned it to her side.

  Amy, who had been desperately searching for any signs of emotion, found herself wishing he would go back to his statue impersonation. Inscrutability was infinitely preferable to rue. And pity.

  ‘I’m sorry, Amy,’ the Gentian was saying, with that same killing gentleness. ‘I wish it could be some other way.’

  The empty platitude scraped along Amy’s heightened nerves, like a stone in her shoe that had to be flung out. ‘What other way?’ she demanded. ‘You’re talking in riddles! Why can’t you see me again? I don’t understand.’

  The Purple Gentian’s jaw tightened, and he gazed out into the air over Amy’s shoulder as though the answer might be lurking somewhere in those selfsame stars he had promised to her earlier.

  Amy watched his averted face anxiously.

  ‘It’s the mission, you see,’ he said finally, awkwardly.

  ‘Oh!’ said Amy, then, ‘No, I don’t see. My information was a help to the mission, wasn’t it?’ she probed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then what? Are you worried about my being in danger? I promise, I’ll be more cautious. I’ll even—’

  Lowering his hooded head to look at Amy, the Gentian pronounced with chilling finality, ‘I can’t let infatuation get in the way of the mission.’

  ‘Infatuation,’ Amy repeated, her eyes begging him, willing him to take the word back. ‘Is that what you feel for me? Infatuation?’

  A dreadful, frozen silence followed. The nightingales stopped chirping. The wind stopped blowing. The stars didn’t dare twinkle. The moon looked as stiff and brittle as Amy felt.